OTHING
is sacred when Melvin James Kaminsky hits town. Kaminsky,
better known as director/producer/writer/actor/outrageous
comic Mel Brooks,
is showing up all over the country at screenings of his
groundbreaking off-the-wall 1974 film
Blazing Saddles,
which the late critic
Roger Ebert described as “a crazed, grab-bag of a movie
that does everything to keep us laughing except hit us over
the head with a rubber chicken.”

When the movie
ends and the lights come up — Mel is unleashed. He’s already
played the Kennedy Center, and recently showed up in
Philadelphia and Hartford.

Mel Brooks

For more than 60
years he has plied his trade turning out sidesplitting
comedies that have skewered every cinematic genre and topic
known to man: Westerns (Blazing
Saddles), horror (Young
Frankenstein), sci-fi (Spaceballs),
Hitler (The Producers),
legends (Robin Hood
Men inTights). Not to mention world history in
The History of the World Part 1 in which he plays five roles —
plus writing, producing and directing. Even
Alfred Hitchcock
got the Brooks treatment (in
High Anxiety.)

Along the way he’s
picked up a bagful of prizes: Oscars, Emmys Grammys. The
auteur director is known also for his five Grammy-winning
comedy albums stemming from
The 2,000 Year Old Man
which got its start in l961.

“Mel is involved
in controlled madness on his movies,” observes actress
Madeline Kahn, a
regular in many of his movies.

John Trembler,
producer of Brooks’s live performances, puts it this way:
“I’m totally in awe of him. He’s a unique force of nature
with the energy of a man half his age.”

Trembler notes
that Brooks’s passion never wanes. “He likes to come to the
theater at the beginning of the movie and sit in the wings
and listen to the audience. Then he shakes his head in
disbelief because they are still laughing 40 years later.”

I talked by phone
with the peripatetic Brooks who amazingly turned 90 on June
28.

How does it feel to
get back in the saddle when you’re pushing 90?I never got out of the
saddle. I’ve been busy. I’m going back to my first
love, which is live theater. I started in the Borscht Belt
when we did three or four items a week in a musical revue, a
play, then amateur night. I was always busy onstage doing
something. Writing sketches beginning on Broadway in l952 in
a show called New Faces
with Eartha Kitt,
Paul Lynde and
Carol Lawrence. I still get goosebumps when a
Broadway orchestra strikes up.

What can we expect
when you go on stage?I kind of talk a lot. It’s a
wandering trip through my life. The story of a poor kid from
Brooklyn. How I came to be. Stories of being in the Army (as
a combat engineer in World War II Germany), hearing a German
platoon singing across the river—and me singing back Toot TootTootsie Goodbye (the Al Jolson song) to straighten them out. Stories
about the TV show GetSmart, and with
the incredible Sid
Caesar and ImogeneCoca, writing
Your Show of Shows
with Carl Reiner
and Neil Simon.

I understand making
Blazing Saddles wasn’t a cakewalk for you?I quit the film once. Richard Pryor was
to be Black Bart the sheriff, but the studio said no.
Richard was having drug problems and wasn’t a proven star.
But he persuaded me to do it without him. He said he
wouldn’t get paid if the movie was cancelled. He helped me
find Cleavon Little
and said, “I’ll be good and get the laughs—but there’s no
way I would scare those rednecks shitless like Cleavon
could.”

Tell us about that
legendary campfire scene? Blazing Saddles
allowed me to be the lovely Rabelaisian vulgarian that I am.
I mean those cowboys farting around the campfire allowed me
for the first time to really exercise my scatological
muscles. So we had a bunch of guys eating a lot of beans and
delivering a mighty symphony orchestra—music in the wind!

What about your
Indian Chief speaking Yiddish. Surely another first for a
Western?I
didn’t want to do the clichéd Indian sounds —Hi Yoyo— and
that sort of stuff. I was thinking that no one knew Yiddish
so why not use it. My grandmother used to speak Yiddish to
me when I was a kid in Brooklyn. At early screenings I saw
that when there are Jews in the balcony there’s thunderous
laughter when the Chief speaks.

Mel Brooks

Did you mother Kate
speak Yiddish.No. She came from Kiev but spoke
with an Irish accent.

Irish? No. She went to grammar
school in New York in l915—and all the teachers and
politicians spoke with an Irish accent. It stuck.

Talk about your
smash hit Broadway musical The Producers,
which came 34 years after the movie opened. Like
Chaplin, you lacerated and lampooned Hitler.It’s part of my
heritage. No Chaplin, no Mel Brooks. You learn from the
greats of the past. In Great
Dictator Chaplin plays this little Jewish barber who is
mistaken for the Fuhrer. He is beautiful, doing that ballet
with the balloon as the globe of the world.

So you borrowed a
leaf from the Chaplin playbook?Yes. When Producers first
came out the critics said it was totally tasteless.
Peter Sellers, the genius English actor, loved it and out of
his own pocket paid for ads in the Hollywood trade papers
saying it was the funniest movie he’d ever seen. And the
film was saved. Before that you couldn’t get arrested.

What drives you at
90?I’m
always doing something. I just played the Kennedy Center
with this show and now I’m doing other venues. I’m
re-energized…up and flying…around the stage. It’s very
important. That’s my fuel, the basis of my energy, the
laughter that comes flying back. Sometimes the energy
is so big that if I wore a hat it would blow away.

Ivor Davis, a Southern California-based writer, is the
author of the sensational newly published memoir
The Beatles and Me on Tourand has covered
the Hollywood beat for four decades as a foreign
correspondent for the London Daily Express and Times of
London and as a columnist for the New York Times Syndicate
and Tribune-Media Syndicate.IvorDavisBeatles.com

PRODUCT
EVALUATION TEAMPET Picks Prime Videos

By Tim Boxer

BACKTRACKTake
a psychiatrist, burdened with the tragic death of his
daughter, and you have a thriller of a movie as the good
doctor (Adrien Brody) can’t help but suspect his patients —
or are they ghosts? — were involved. Naturally this is one
psychological supernatural thriller that will haunt you.
Lionsgate, 90 minutes, Blu-ray $19.99, DVD $19.98.

WELCOME
TO KUTSHER’SRelive the glory days
of the Catskills in this nostalgic documentary of the last
surviving Jewish resort in the legendary Borsht Belt.
Remember the days when we sought relief from the sweltering
canyons of Manhattan to bask in the refreshing pool by day
and get off on the hilarious one-liners by Freddie Roman and
Henny Youngman in the nightclub. We can only relish the
memories of those days now that the last campus of cool
mountain dew was sold and demolished in 2014. This video by
producers Caroline Laskow and Ian Rosenberg will ensure that
the Catskills experience remain in our hearts forever.
Menemsha Films, 72 minutes, DVD $29.95 at
MenemshaFilms.com.

THE DECENT ONE A riveting and chilling
documentary based on the captured diaries and papers of
Heinrich Himmler, whose Nazi work description consists of
chief of the German police and the Gestapo, head of the SS
secret police and its armored division, the Waffen SS,
responsible for security at the concentration camps, and in
control of the extermination of Europe’s Jews. Kino Lorber,
88 minutes, DVD $24.95

BELLY
BEAUTIFUL WORKOUT Third in
Patricia Friberg’s series focuses on pre and postnatal
Pilates Barre Fusion. She follows the guidelines of the
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for safe
exercising. Workouts sections include pelvic floor
activation exercises; also pre and postnatal barre for arm
and thigh (and bottom) exercises. A new dad bonus aims to
help dads build tolerance and strength for muscles when
lifting baby.
patriciafriberg.com, 89 minutes, $19.95.

PRODUCT
EVALUATION TEAMPET Picks Prime Music

LUKAS
FOSS: COMPLETE SYMPHONIES
Celebrating its 20th season, the Boston Modern Orchestra
Project (BMOP) has released the first recording of the
complete orchestral works of the Jewish composer Lukas Foss
on its independent record label, BMOP/sound. Gil
(1922-2009). Gil Rose conducted. The Jewish composer and
child prodigy was born Lukas Fuchs in 1922 in Berlin, moved
with his family to Paris in 1933, and immigrated to the
United States four years later. He died in 2009. “Although
his roots are firmly grounded in Boston, Foss played a
leading role in America's music history,” said Gil Rose,
BMOP/sound executive producer. BMOP/sound, two-disc CD,
$35.99

CLARK
PATERSON: THE FINAL TRADITION Ten
songs written by Clark Paterson and Cline Bates, sung by
Paterson in his third album. His rough voice will penetrate
your heart and hit you in the kishkes.

PETE KENNEDY: HEART OF GOTHAM
For two decades Pete Kennedy has
been one-half of the folk-pop duo, The Kennedys, with wife
Maura. Now the guitarist steps into the spotlight as a
singer-songwriter with a solo album of original songs
written over a period of five years from his home base in
Greenwich Village, reflecting his deep love of New York.

NADAV
LEV: NEW STRINGS ATTACHED The
Israeli-born guitarist, now based in New York, gathered new
music from prominent composers in Israel for a trove of
contemporary guitar music. Collaborating with nine
world-renowned musicians and vocalists, Lev has created a
wonderful showcase of guitar music. $14.98 at
delosmusic.com.

LOVE,
GUNS & MONEY is Bianca DeLeon’s
fourth album, brimming with unrequited love, her soul
yearning for the man she thought she had. Also about guns in
the streets and money everywhere the night Noriega fell.
Beautiful haunting songs out of the south Texas borderlands.
biancamusic.com